In this series, Leonard takes the writings and history of three female German mystics that lived at Helfta monastery (at Eisleben, Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany) during the Middle Ages as a starting point to reflect on the limitations of representation.
She considers the unseen and invisible within a captured or created image, aiming to create connections between the medium of photography and the visions depicted by the mystics in their texts.
As she states, “How do we describe that which is beyond representation? What lies at the edge of our vision? For a medium that has an indexical relationship to reality, much has been theorized about photography’s relationship to the invisible. In my work, I look at how photography’s failure – the limits of its representation – might be the very source of its revelatory power.”
